Apparel Inventory Software for Wholesale & Distribution

The apparel wholesale and distribution business presents distinct inventory management challenges, compared with managing other types of inventory. The most obvious difference is that you may have hundreds or even thousands of SKUs for items that are similar, but have to be tracked separately. For example, the same style sweater may be available in several colors and also many different sizes.

A single product style, if available in 6 colors and 8 sizes, would create 48 separate individual SKUs (products) to track. This can complicate order entry and processing – not to mention setting up the inventory in the first place. Fortunately, there are solutions, such as an Apparel Matrix, that will automate this process for you – generating all the required SKUs for a product group from a single definition process.

The following specific functionality that will provide time-saving inventory management tools for an apparel wholesaler or distributor:

Product Generation

In the above example, manually keying 48 separate products for a single
style can be cumbersome and time-consuming. Product generation functionality is a vital piece of apparel inventory software and can save a lot of time when defining new products. Typically, you define a base part number (such as a style) with variations in the product ID for to account for size and color.

This is particularly useful when you consider a scenario where you not only need to create dozens of variations of a product, but need to input descriptions, categories, pricing and other product info. Replicating this info manually across dozens of variations would be both time-consuming, and error-prone.

Order Entry & Purchasing Matrix

Since both sales and purchase orders are likely to contain products of the same style with varied colours and sizes, it is much easier to enter quantities in a matrix for a given style. For example:

Using this approach, an order entry employee can place orders by navigating a matrix of all colors and sizes for a given style, adding quantities where appropriate. This would create multiple order lines in a faction of the time it would take to key them in line by line.

The same functionality should be available for placing purchase orders. Similarly, a matrix approach to price changes on a sales order purchase order can again save time and reduce the scope for errors.

With appropriate apparel inventory software, entering orders line by line can be a thing of the past.